Thursday, July 19, 2018

Date: December 24, 1994. Place: Indian
Springs Spa, Calistoga, California, two hours north of San Francisco. My
second-husband-to-be Alvin Curran and I emerged from our mud packs so blissed
out we couldn’t imagine trudging back down to where we were staying in the city,
so we asked for a room for the night. “All booked up,” replied the receptionist
from under her teased beehive, “And since it’s Christmas Eve so will be everywhere
else in town that has a hot pool.” We kept pestering her until she admitted,
“Well there is this one place, a good 45 minutes from here, they might have
room. But it’s kind of, umm, funky.”

I dialed the number. Yes, they did
have hot spring water and yes, they did have a free room. “We have a problem,
though,” I said. “We only meant to go to Calistoga for mudpacks, so we didn’t
bring any bathing suits along.” “Oh, that’s ok,” said the voice, “We can arrange
something.”

The drive took a solid hour through driving
rain, over roads that shrank to lanes then to trails, and by the time we handed
over our parking fee at the gate of Harbin Hot
Springs night had fallen. As we inched forward through the mud, pale figures
began to emerge from the darkness, swinging flashlights, and sporting boots but
not another stitch of clothing. Both “funky” and “we can arrange something”
suddenly made sense: this joint was nudist!

The next morning as we stood soaking
to our chins along the edge of the warm pool, exchanging smiles with
fellow-hedonists, a burly fellow climbed in as naked as the rest of us, scanned
the faces, chose mine, and extended his hand saying, “You look like you could
use a watsu.” “A what?” “Close your eyes and I’ll show you…” The WATer shiatSU treatment
he gave me, swishes and stretches and massages on the surface of the water, was
a blissful pas de deux that must have lasted only ten minutes but felt like
forever. In my life I’d had lots of massages and other kinds of body work,
but watsu was in its own league.

As I later learned, watsu was invented in the early 1980s by Harold Dull, who moved
to Harbin after making his name as a poet in San Francisco. His inventive
spirit transported zen
shiatsu, which he had studied in Japan with its inventor, Shizuto Masunaga,
to the warm spring waters of the hippie spa. The experience is relaxing and
energizing at the same time, somewhere between meditating, flying, and dropping
mescaline. At least that’s what it felt like to me.

After some years of making runs up to
Harbin every time I was in California, in 2000 I decided I’d try seeing what it
was like to take on the other role. Giving watsu treatments turned out to be
nearly as mind-blowing as receiving them, and three hundred hours of training later
I was ready to start practicing bodywork on days I wasn’t seeing patients with colds and cystitis.

There was only one hitch: finding the
right pool. A watsu pool has to be large enough to swing a client around, calm
and quiet enough to permit complete relaxation, just the right depth, and just
the right temperature (34º-35º Centigrade, 93º-97º Fahrenheit). Jacuzzis are
too small, heated swimming pools not heated enough. Italy’s many famous hot
springs can be great for watsu, but the closest to me is an hour and a half drive.

After an exhaustive hunt I found a
place inside Rome that qualified, barely: an off-kilter urban spa provocatively
named Extasia. The water was so shallow I had to work literally on my knees, and
the risk that my client might get skewered on a sharp corner that stuck out
into the tiny pool kept me figuratively on my toes. Plus we all couldn’t help
but notice one tall white-coated employee who was always popping in and out of
the reception area, sporting a short skirt and a strangely prominent Adam’s
apple. I did manage give a couple of dozen sessions…

…until one day I heard the place had
been closed down – by the vice squad. When eventually they did re-open, they
thought it more prudent to bar outside therapists.

I moved on to the lovely swimming
pool in the basement of the Grand Palace Hotel on Via Veneto, which they were
willing, for a reasonable sum, to heat to watsu temperatures on special
request. But around 2010 it too closed down, voluntarily, and when it reopened two
years later the new management couldn’t be talked into hosting such a
suspicious-sounding activity as water-based massage. Alas, I don’t yet have a decent
substitute yet anywhere in Rome – the only appropriate pool I’ve found prices
itself out of the running. All suggestions are welcome.

Saddest of all, my beloved Harbin Hot
Springs was destroyed in the northern California fires of 2015. It is still
struggling to rebuild.

Monday, July 9, 2018

If I had felt like
it, when I opened my medical office for business on Rome’s Via Scialoja in 1980
I could have set up a double-duty exam table that tilted thisaway for me to
take your Pap smear and thataway for me to fill your cavities. True, most dental
drills in Italy even back then were wielded by guys who had gone through all
the paces: first a regular medical degree, then a book-based specialization in
teeth, finally a practical apprenticeship with a dentist father or family
friend to actually learn the job. But a good chunk of the Dentista offices were run by . . . General Practitioners, who
rounded out their income with improvised odontoiatric skills. Until 1984 anyone
who had graduated from medical school could legally set up shop as a dentist in
Italy, without having done a specialization and without any hand-in-mouth
training whatsoever. It must have taken nerves of steel. By now, thankfully,
that cohort of medical moonlighters are almost all retired.

In Italy the default for doctors and hospitals is public, but the
default for dentists is private. For one thing the waiting list for dental work
on the public health system can be two years long, and for another NHS dentists
are notoriously "cavadenti"
who yank teeth instead of fixing them. So whereas private medicine in Italy is largely
for the well-to-do, private dentists cater to the masses. But – paradox – they
charge twice what they do in the States. The circle is squared by a semi-clandestine
horde of cut-rate imposters – as per one
of my first blog posts.

(There are phony physicians too, of course. One Roman
pseudo-doctor, unmasked after 15 years of practice, rode off into the sunset on
his bicycle. Two months later a clochard died of exposure on the steps of a
noble Palazzo: it was him. But, then, in
2003 Florida alone convicted 101 fake physicians, so we can confidently
guess that right this moment thousands of charlatans are practicing medicine
without a license in the US.)

Nino Campanelli, my own dentist for my first 30 years in Rome,
had a delicate touch and was a whiz with the Xylocaine. Once, though, I had an
emergency while Nino was out of town, and when his substitute leaned on my
shoulder for leverage it came close to dislocating. The day they gave a lesson
on how to handle flesh gently he must have played hooky. I told my beloved Nino
he’d handed me over to a backup who was oblivious to patient comfort. He
answered with a sigh: “Yes, I know, he’s a little rough. He knows his stuff,
but until now he’s been working in the National Health Service. He still needs
to learn how to behave with private patients.” That’s all I know from personal
experience about public dentistry, and all I need to know.

About Me

I moved to Rome in 1978 after finishing my training in New York, and have been practicing primary care internal medicine there ever since, treating a clientele that’s featured Roman auto mechanics and British ambassadors, Indonesian art restorers and Filipina maids, Russian poets and Ethiopian priests. When not seeing patients, doing research in psychosomatic medicine, or being the Artist's Wife to my composer husband, I've written a book about my medical adventures, Dottoressa: An American Doctor In Rome, to be published by Paul Dry Books in May 2019.